This is going to be a short and sweet little history of Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005.
Take a look at what Reddit looked like in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061206235353/http://reddit.com/
Note that it didn’t have subreddits back then because the user base was too small.
Look at Reddit in 2008 (December 31): https://web.archive.org/web/20081231080128/http://www.reddit.com/reddits/
Politics had just 72,314 subscribers. Technology had 85,678 subscribers, and the “Nicher” Food subreddit had only 4,438 subscribers.
Lemmy/Kbin follows the same path. Initially, generalist communities like Politics and Technology will have the most momentum and gain subscribers, just like Reddit did back then. As the user base grows, “niche” communities will be able to sustain themselves.
Let’s not think about the Reddit of today, let’s think about Reddit of old. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
The other two are being worked on but onboarding will always be tricky as people have to get their head around instances. It’s not too tricky but still a hurdle.
The join a server page could do with an improvement - perhaps let people add their location and interests and offer them a more filtered list with some data like active users and uptime.
i got on lemmy without understanding how instances work, and even now, after 2 months and +100 comments, i know very little
I take this as a big point for “see how well you can do without caring about it”. And think talking about it should be kept to a minimum during onboarding. Although it’s understandable why pages like https://join-lemmy.org/ talk so much about it, even about hosting your own server!
This is from nerds to nerds, in a wholesome way. But most people aren’t nerds, and as you prove, don’t need to get into the details to use it, enjoy it, participate and contribute.
My vision is: Hide all the tech talk in ‘advanced signup’ and make the default signup process as quick and easy as possible.
Like driving my car. I haven’t got a clue how it all works under the hood but I know enough to get me where I want, when I want.
Absolutely! I love the steps Mastodon is taking. Basically when you click join from the main page you get an account on mastodon.social and it just works. You really need to dig around to find other instances.
I’m hoping there’s an instance that figures out how to become popular and financially sustainable enough to be able to support that scale. Maybe it’s lemmy.world or maybe it’s another one in the future.
That’s quite good going - although it could be that,.unless you run an instance, there isn’t actually much to know and the little you know is all you need to know. It’s a hurdle, but a low one.
I kinda wish the Fediverse took an SSO approach to instance sign-in, where you can log into your account that’s on your instance, from any instance that is federated with yours.
The sign in would be handled entirely by your instance, and it would then give something like a JWT token to the federated instance to certify that you are signed in.